God Is Not Great - Christopher Hitchens

God is Not Great

by 

Christopher Hitchens

Before his untimely death last year, Christopher Hitchens was regarded as one half of the Twin Threat of 'New Athiesm' - the other half being Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is an arch rationalist - scientific, thorough and angry. He has a great talent in being able to wind people up - regardless of what he has to say. Hitchens has a slightly different approach - equally thorough but more like a fireside chat rather than an angry lecture -  Hitchens was a journalist rather than a scientist. 

The question really with books by Hitchens, Dawkins or anyone else of a similar bent is: "what's the point?" - those who are believers almost certainly won't read this book, or if they do, they won't change their mind. I suppose there might be those who are wavering or on the edge, and might read this, looking for a final bit of convincing. To be honest though, religious faith doesn't rely on proof, facts or evidence. It boils down to faith - choosing to believe in the absence of evidence. For me, I suppose its nice to know that other people feel the same way I do. Having grown up in a country where over 90% of the population were Catholic (though 75% of those only go to mass because they're afraid of their mammies), it's still refreshing to me now to hear a logical, realistic alternative point of view. 

So, what's in the book then? Well, Hitchens systematically goes through each major faith: Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Judaism, Buddhism, Shintoism, Mormonism (is it called Mormonism?) and Jehovah's Witness(ism?), their history, how their current beliefs came to be, and neatly skewers each one. I think the Sikh's can wipe their brows in relief - they seemed to escape. Maybe Hitchens was like me in that he had an irrational liking for Sikhs - I just automatically assume any Sikh man I see is going to be really nice. I also like that they can bring their knives into Olympic venues - I may convert. Anyway, no one is spared in this analysis - such apparent saints as Mother Theresa, The Dalai Lama and Mohandas Gandhi all go under the microscope, and come out less clean. He is unstinting in his criticism - not holding back on anyone or anything, even for fear of being the victim of a fatwa. The only halfway religious figure who comes out of it well is Dr Martin Luther King. The breadth of this knowledge - or the quality of his research are impressive. To fully understand any of the major religions, you need to have a very good knowledge of history and politics, and Hitchens scores very highly in these areas. 

Once he has dealt with the major faiths, he moves on to the major arguments put to atheists by the faithful: "Without religion, there would be no morality", "Religion is a force for good" and the old chestnut "more evil and deaths have been caused by Godless leaders like Hitler, than by any religions or religious leaders". The first of these points is the easiet to disprove - it's not like the cells of the world are filled with the irreligious - the most corrupt country I have experienced: Nigeria, is also the most religious I have experienced. The second point is one of those to be permanently debated - depending on which side of the argument you are on. The third argument was for me, the most interesting part of the book. Hitchens takes a long look at the role the Catholic Church played in openly supporting Mussolini and Franco - and though some priests initially  opposed Hitler, in the end they had his back too - so much so, they were complicit in getting many high ranking Nazi officers out of Europe and into South America at the end of WWII. He also looks at the religious devotion of the Japanese people and military during this period - their leader was regarded as a god, after all.

Hitchens also looks at countries like North Korea, where religion (and pretty much everything else) is banned. The accusation is that when religion is removed, you are left with this horrible country - is often used to justify religion as a force for good. However as we are told that Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung are able to walk on water, shoot animals with arrows from 500 yards and perform various other miracles - it seems that one religion has been replaced with another.

Anyway, as I alluded to earlier - I'm not sure if this book will change your mind, unless you're looking to have your mind changed, and it will further convince those who are already convinced

2 Books - 1 Small Update. Blame my Kindle

I Blame My Kindle - a 2 book mini-review.

"Stuff White People Like" - Christian Lander

"Seeing Further" - edited by Bill Bryson

You see? This is what you happens when you get a Kindle. It's the book equivalent of an MP3 player. With a cassette, or even with a CD player, you were more inclined to listen to a whole album the whole way through, and give it a couple of listens before you abandoned it. With MP3 players, your whole album collection is on shuffle, and if you're like me, there are songs on there you have never listened to. So it is with the Kindle - I have about 200 books on there and the temptation to skip around, especially if the book I'm currently reading is a bit tricky, is always there. 

So, the book I'm officially reading, I'm still reading and hopefully I'll review that next week. Hopefully. Despite it being an interesting read, I couldn't help but stray off course not once, but twice. Hence the 2 book mini review you now see in front of you.

So - 'Stuff White People Like' was a very funny website (it still exits, it just hasn't been updated in over 2 years). It pokes fun about, well - about stuff white people like. More specifically it pokes fun at the white liberal middle-class (me, then). Each week - it picked a different topic: Having Black Friends, Picking Their Own Fruit, Banksy, Ironic Tattoos, Mad Men, Yoga etc etc, and took the piss out of it. It was pretty funny, mostly because it was an accurate dart through the heart of pretentious hipster trendies. I fully confess to liking a lot of the topics in here: The Onion, Being On Time, Microbrewery Beer etc. As a book, it just doesn't work as well. The only reason for this is that it feels a bit samey if you more than 3 or 4 in a row. As such, it makes for a very good 'toilet reader', and that isn't damning with faint praise - toilet reading is a very underrated experience. Maybe 'Reading on the toilet' will be in Book #2 of the series. 

'Seeing Further' threw me off guard. This was mostly because my Kindle said it was a Bill Bryson book, and if you cast your view up into the top right hand corner of this blog to see the cover, you'll see a great big red 'Bill Bryson', and above it, a teeny-tiny "edited by". So, the first chapter is a highly enjoyable Bill Bryson style romp through the history of the Royal Society. If you liked 'A Short History of Nearly Everything', you'll enjoy this too. However, thereafter you'll find individual chapters written by assorted historians, scientists and authors. I confess to not knowing who most of them are - with the exceptions of Margaret Atwood and Richard Dawkins (he does Science too!). The problem is, that none of them write as well as Bryson, who has an everyman approach to science, which for me, makes it highly accessible.

There's no doubt the Royal Society (basically the inventors of modern science) are deserving of a stellar book celebrating its life and times, and of course there's no reason it all has to be easy-reading and easy to understand. It's just going to be one of those books, like Stuff White People Like, that I won't be reading in one go - it'll be chapters here and there I think. Too big to tackle on the toilet I should think - even for me. 

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

by Seth Grahame-Smith

Legend has it that a small US publisher called Quirk had the idea for a tongue in cheek mash-up book called "Pride & Prejudice & Zombies", and enlisted a young freelancer called Seth Grahame-Smith to write it. The book proved to be a huge success and has spawned a whole host of copycats (Sense & Sensibility & Seamonsters, Jane Slayre). As for Grahame-Smith (SGS), he took a leaf from Quirk's book, and he got himself a deal on practically just a book title. That title was Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter - it too sold by the bucket load, and as most of you know has been made into a (modestly successful) movie too. 

I think it would be very easy to write a very bad version of this book - or this sort of book in general (There's a Queen Victoria: Demon Slayer, you know). Fortunately, SGS is a pretty decent writer, generating sympathy, and making the whole thing feel...well...realistic. SGS starts off being visited by a mysterious stranger who presents him with the lost diaries of Lincoln himself - from which SGS pieces together the 'real' story of Lincoln. 

I confess to not being up to speed on my American Civil War history, or my knowledge of Lincoln in general. I suspect that if you did have this knowledge, the book would tickle you much more. As it was, there was enough here to keep me going - the Vampire Hunting is used sparingly, and there is far more politics and actual history going on in here. 

The basic conceit is that the Vampires came over from the old world and looked upon slaves as an easy method of getting access to blood with no questions asked. They get ambitions to control more than just the slaves - and in their way is a vampire hating politician from the North, and voilà! civil war ensues.

SGS seems to have a knack for being good at a 2-line book pitch, as I like the sound of his new book: Unholy Night (the 3 wise men are actually thieves, they stumble upon Jesus's manger and end up defending the holy family against a night of terrors). There's nothing in here that's going to keep Phillip Roth awake at night, but because it's so deadpan and serious, it doesn't come across as try-hard - you just accept the premise that young Abe hunted vampires and get on it with it. Good fun

A Year of Living Biblically: AJ Jacobs

The Year of Living Biblically

by AJ Jacobs

So, 'Stunt Journalism' then. You know the sort of thing - one man tries to do something wacky for a while: Morgan Spurlock eats only McDonalds, Danny Wallace says 'yes' to everything for a year, you get the drift. That was my original thought when I heard of this book. Esquire journalist AJ Jacobs decides to spend a year of his life trying to follow the rules of the bible. As a 'secular Jew', the easy and obvious thing for Jacobs to do would have been to point out all the inconsistencies ("the stuff that contradicts the other stuff" - Ned Flanders) and all the people who believe in them. It makes for a better book that he tries and succeeds to do more with it.

Jacobs is a self-confessed agnostic - but he admirably enters into this enterprise with openness. If he is going to try to follow the Bible for a year, then the most difficult thing to do is to actually make yourself 'believe'. There are plenty of quirky rules that Jacobs delights in trying to follow - not shaving for a year and taking on a 'slave', for example. However, what the book is really about is trying to examine what the bible means to people, and what was behind the original rule making in the first place. 

Jacobs speaks to a huge amount of Biblical experts and consults a huge amount of books in his quest. His thank-you list and his bibliography at the end of the book are both enormous -which I suppose is not surprising when studying the most popular book in the world. Jacobs makes a point of speaking to an extremely wide range of people - pointing out that the Bible means nearly as much in the Jewish faith as it does in the Christian one. 

There is definitely a schism between those who believe the New Testament makes much of the Old Testament unnecessary, and those who take the entire thing as equally important. This is something even the most casual observer is aware of. However, what I wasn't aware of was just how many different opinions and interpretations of the Bible there are. Estimates say there are between 3000 and 7000 different bibles. That's not different interpretations, that published bibles with different words - extra bits added in or left out. 

There is not one rule or law that isn't in dispute amongst bible followers - even "thou shalt not kill" has a number of different translations and interpretations. It's also a mistake to assume all fundamentalists believe the same thing: there are gay fundamentalists, socialist fundamentalists (Red Letter Christians). There's a number of different schools of thought even within Creationists. Catholics, Protestants and Jews don't even agree on what should be in the Bible. Jacobs doesn't point this out to make fun of the Bible, but to observe it is practically impossible to follow certain rules, when no-one can agree what that rule means. 

There is a lot of Jacobs' personal life in the book - his wife and child - and their attempts to have more children (the Bible may or may not have something to say about IVF - Catholics don't like it but Jews do). This is possibly where the book falls down - Jacobs is the amiable bumbling man, while his wife is the uptight sensible one - just like a Judd Apatow film, or in fact a Morgan Spurlock film/Danny Wallace book. His attempts to explain why he can't touch or sit in the same seat as his menstruating wife are pretty funny though. 

He is at his best when he talking to the numerous theologists and believers about their version of what the Bible means. He is open and non-judgemental - and takes seriously his attempts to at least try and believe what they believe.